Ex-soldier's children follow tracks of war / Bergen's novel set in Vietnam and Canada

Reviewed by Dan Zigmond

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, January 1, 2006

Book cover art for, "The Time In Between" A Novel by David Bergen.

Book cover art for, "The Time In Between" A Novel by David Bergen.

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Book cover art for, "The Time In Between" A Novel by David Bergen.

Book cover art for, "The Time In Between" A Novel by David Bergen.

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Ex-soldier's children follow tracks of war / Bergen's novel set in Vietnam and Canada

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The Time in Between

By David Bergen

RANDOM HOUSE; 242 PAGES; $23.95

When Charles Boatman disappears on a pilgrimage to Vietnam, his daughter, Ada, and son, Jon, abandon their comfortable lives in Canada to search for him, retracing his steps there as both a middle-aged seeker and a youthful soldier. A sparse and moving meditation on the burden of war across generations, Canadian author David Bergen's "The Time in Between" weaves together all of these journeys to Vietnam into a rich and rewarding novel.

The book opens in the midst of a typhoon, with Ada and Jon huddling in an unnamed hotel. The initial sense of bewilderment created in this scene never entirely fades as the subsequent chapters unfold, and Ada herself seems to share and even relish the feeling:

Ada, who for so long has floated about, brushing up against people with whom she had little connection, has left her small apartment in Vancouver and is standing in a hotel room looking out at a perplexing and alien place where the language she hears was more beautiful because she does not understand it.

Although Ada quickly emerges as the novel's center, "The Time in Between" shifts back and forth between her quest and her father's, and several times reaches back to their lives in Canada, where Charles raised his children in near-total isolation in the mountains of British Columbia. Bergen manages to press many strong stories into these lean pages.

Before his return to Vietnam, a friend from his soldier days sent Charles a Vietnamese novel, "In a Dark Wood," probably modeled on the real-life book "The Sorrow of War" by the Vietnamese author Bao Ninh. Among many unusual choices, Bergen pauses the main narrative to quote at length from this story-within-a-story, and his "excerpt" includes a harrowing account of an atrocity far worse than Charles' own sin. Charles becomes obsessed by this account, although he claims "he would not have been able to explain, to anyone who asked, why this particular story moved him."

Readers will not be surprised that Americans (and others) committed atrocities in Vietnam or that innocent people died. Charles is neither a hero nor a monster, but he remains haunted by the war and by his one fatal mistake. The incident that so scarred Charles is described several times: While on patrol one day, in the outskirts of a small village near Da Nang, he panicked and shot a civilian.

In one of Bergen's more poignant passages, he puts it this way:

"There was the sun and then shadow and in the shadow a shape and the shape became a man and the man fell on the ground, in the place of the man, there appeared a young boy with a hole in his neck." Charles rarely spoke to his children about the war, and for this reason "he saw himself as a liar, though he didn't know that the truth would necessarily help anyone."

Charles starts his return to Vietnam in Hanoi, "in a run-down hotel with uneven stairs and cold-water showers." He soon makes his way back down to Da Nang, where he explains to an American couple he meets, "I'm one of those burdened ex-soldiers, I guess." He befriends these fellow expatriates: Jack, a self-proclaimed missionary who has dragged his family abroad in search of lost souls, and his wife, Elaine, who is trying valiantly to hold the family together along the way.

Whether or not Charles and Elaine become more than friends is one of several mysteries that Ada is never able to solve, though we as readers learn more than she can discover.

The frequent point-of-view shifts, particularly between Ada and her father, give us multiple angles on key events. In many cases, we know more than the characters because we've seen things they are trying to imagine. Bergen takes real risks here, revealing (to us, but not to Ada) exactly what became of Charles Boatman about halfway through the novel.

Few authors would risk "spoiling" the secret, but there are so many captivating stories here, we don't need this puzzle to keep us turning the last 100 pages.

It's been more than 30 years since the fall of Saigon, but the Vietnam War still reverberates through our culture. Some amazing literature emerged from that tragedy -- books such as Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato" -- and political arguments about the efficacy and morality of the American intervention there are rehashed daily as we struggle with our latest foreign invasion.

But decades after that war ended, David Bergen's beautiful and timely novel shows that the well is not dry, that so many years and so many wars later, there are still new things to say about Vietnam, and new ways to write about the way one conflict touched so many lives.